Frequency response mismatch calibration in 2-channel time-interleaved oscilloscopes

The time-interleaved (TI) structure has been widely implemented in high speed, wideband data acquisition systems to increase the system sampling rate. However, the frequency responses of each sub-sampling path are not identical. This is named frequency response mismatches (FRMs). In TI-based printed circuit board level systems, due to the impact of the parasitic parameters, the FRMs are more complicated than the mismatches in TI analog-to-digital converters (TIADCs), which degrade the system performance severely. Therefore, the FRM calibration in 2-channel TI acquisition systems with two features is researched. The first one is that the TI system has a larger mismatch range than in most previous research. The second one is that the channel frequency response uses the general model. The calibration structure is established by the analysis of the digital TI model, which implements the TI operation in the digital domain to reconstruct the mismatches in the time domain. Furthermore, the problem of designing an arbitrary frequency response filter is transformed to the question of designing a three-stage cascaded filter group, which gives a method to realize the arbitrary frequency response in a real system. An oscilloscope prototype is proposed to verify the calibration performance. The simulation and experiment show the following: (i) Even though it uses the general frequency response and the FRMs are significant, the proposed method is still effective. (ii) The mismatch range of magnitude and phase responses is highly suppressed, and the spurious-free dynamic range is improved by 16.26 dB after calibration of the prototype.